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THE PICTURE PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL EDITION IS HERE! The ASPP is pleased to present our first electronic version of our quarterly publication, made possible through the support of CORBIS IMAGES. In addition to our beautifully produced print edition, we hope our members and subscribers will enjoy the extra content sprinkled throughout the publication as well as the convenience of having even more industry information just a click away. Dive in and enjoy!
We also thank C&S Publishing for bringing our magazine to life!
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PORTFOLIO
TALKING PHOTOGRAPHY
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LELAND Y. LEE
© Jennifer MaHarry
ART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN
WHAT’S HANGING
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PHOTO EXHIBITIONS NEAR YOU
LISA TYSON ENNIS BY FRANK VAN RIPER
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BOOK REVIEWS
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WHAT WE’RE READING
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
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BY MICHAEL MASTERSON
EDITOR’S LETTER
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BY APRIL WOLFE
ISSUE 1 / 2012
CHAPTER CAPTURE
THE PICTURE PROFESSIONAL
CHAPTER MEETINGS NATIONWIDE
CALISPHERE
© AP
CHANGES IN THE WIND
PORTFOLIO
© Man Ray
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© Lisa Tyson Ennis
LANE COLLINS
© Leland Y. Lee
© Heather Landis
© Lane Collins
PORTFOLIO
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BY JOSH STEICHMANN
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THE LAW:MASS DIGITIZATION 46
BY PAT HUNT
BY JOEL L. HECKER, ESQ.
CONTRIBUTORS
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LIFE IN FOCUS
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BY KIM PHIPPS
COVER IMAGE: © LANE COLLINS “RABBIT” American Society of Picture Professionals
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aspp.com
American Society of Picture
We are a community of image experts committed to sharing our experience and knowledge throughout the industry. We provide professional networking and educational opportunities. If you create, edit, license, manage or publish images, ASPP is the place for you.
Professionals
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Fundamental Photographs
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Goodman/Van Riper Photography Sisters Image Research
VIREO/The Academy of Natural Sciences
Bridgeman Art Library
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MASTHEAD
Sovfoto/Eastfoto
The Picture Professional quarterly magazine of the American Society of Picture Professionals, Inc.
ASPP Executive Offices 217 Palos Verdes Blvd., #700 Redondo Beach CA 90277 Tel: 424.247.9944 Fax: 424.247.9844 director@aspp.com
Treasurer Mary Fran Loftus
Editorial Staff Jain Lemos - Publisher April Wolfe - Editor-in-Chief Ophelia Chong - Art Director Kim Phipps - Photo Editor
Technology Cecilia de Querol
Bay Area Mike Kahn
Marketing & Communications Jennifer Davis Heffner
Minnesota Julie Caruso
Contributing Writers Joel L. Hecker, Esq. Frank Van Riper Pat Hunt Josh Steichmann Paul Henning Brian Seed 2012-2013 National Board of Directors President Michael Masterson Vice President Sam Merrell Secretary Sid Hastings
Membership Doug Brooks Holly Marshall
DC/South Lori Epstein Jeff Mauritzen
Editorial April Wolfe editor@aspp.com
2012 Sub-Chapter Vice Presidents
National President Michael Masterson michaeldmasterson@gmail.com
Missouri Sid Hastings
2012 Chapter Presidents
Ohio Mandy Groszko
West Mark Ippolito Jason Davis
Wisconsin Paul H. Henning
MidWest George Sinclair Wendy Zieger
Advertising & Executive Officers Jain Lemos Executive Director director@aspp.com
New England Jennifer Riley Debra LaKind
Membership Doug Brooks Holly Marshall membership@aspp.com Website Daryl Geraci webmanager@aspp.com Tel: 602-561-9535 eNews Blog Cecilia de Querol newsletter@aspp.com Website (www.aspp.com) Daryl Geraci webmanager@aspp.com Tel: 602-561-9535
New York Jessica Moon Daniella Nilva
• The American Society of Picture Professionals (ASPP) is a community of image experts committed to sharing their experience and knowledge throughout the industry and to promoting the professional and educational advancement of members. This non-profit, non-partisan association provides networking and educational opportunities for those who create, edit, research, license, manage or publish visual media. The Picture Professional (ISSN 1084-3701) is published spring, summer, fall and winter as a forum for distribution of information about use, purchase and sale of imagery. • ASPP is dedicated to promoting and maintaining high professional standards and ethics and cooperates with organizations that have similar or allied interests. We welcome the submission of articles and news from all sources, on all aspects of the imagery profession. Send articles and accompanying illustrations with clear captions and credit lines. Contact: editor@aspp.com • Advertising is also desired and welcomed. We offer a specific readership of professionals in positions of responsibility for decision making and purchase. For our media kit and rate sheet, contact Jain Lemos, 424-247-9944. Space reservation deadlines: February 10, May 10, August 10, November 10. Subscription rates: Free to members, $40.00 per year to non-members. Back issues: $10.00 when available. Non-members are invited to consider membership in ASPP. Address changes: Send both old and new addresses to the National Office or update your individual profile in the Member Area on our website at www.aspp.com. • ©2012 American Society of Picture Professionals, Inc. Single photocopies of materials protected by this copyright may be made for noncommercial pursuit of scholarship or research. For permission to republish any part of this publication, contact the Editor-in-Chief. ASPP assumes no responsibility for the statements and opinions advanced by the contributors to the Society’s publications. Editorial views do not necessarily represent the official position of ASPP. Acceptance of an advertisement does not imply endorsement by ASPP of any product or service.
American Society of Picture Professionals
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PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
©Eric Raptosh
MICHAEL D. MASTERSON ASPP NATIONAL PRESIDENT
DEAR PICTURE PROS, We launch another era with this edition of The Picture Professional, our first crafted by April Wolfe, our new editorin-chief. She’s stepping into the very big shoes of Niki Barrie (not literally of course—Niki’s feet are actually quite normally sized), jumping into her new role fearlessly, full of enthusiasm and ideas. That will be obvious once you finish skimming this and turn the page! Look for expanded portfolios and features this year, along with the columns and departments you’ve always enjoyed. And we welcome your feedback and ideas. Just drop a line to editor@aspp.com and let us know what you think. The past year brought innumerable changes to the ASPP. We transitioned to a new executive director and moved our office from Virginia to California. Our society bylaws (not revised since 1983) were updated to reflect the changes in our industry and the law over the last decades. Our longtime magazine editorin-chief retired (see above), and we put a new publications team in place. The national board agreed to broaden our membership criteria to allow aspiring professionals to join as affiliates, and we added discounted memberships for military personnel and members living in the same household. We increased our member benefits, including a health insurance option, and our tech team revamped aspp.com, launching a new ASPP blog, and retooling our monthly e-newsletter as well. The ASPP also held its biennial national board elections in November and welcomed new additions, including Jennifer Davis Heffner as marketing/communications chair and Doug Brooks as national membership co-chair. Holly Marshall moved from vice president into the other membership cochair position, and Sam Merrell traded technology for VP. All of us are grateful that Mary Fran Loftus stayed on as national treasurer, along with Cecilia de Querol, who continues to helm American Society of Picture Professionals
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technology, and the ever-capable Sid Hastings, who’s serving as secretary. Only Sid can make our meeting minutes so riveting! And I was honored to be re-elected for a second term as your national president. You and I are both lucky to have such a strong, talented, energized national board. We’re also starting the year off right with Corbis as a new corporate sponsor. You’ll find them as an advertiser in the magazine in print and now online. They have graciously agreed to sponsor the digital version of The Picture Professional, which will make its debut with this issue. The online version (which you may actually be reading by now) will broaden our reach and provide greater exposure for our advertisers. And we have more goals for 2012, including further fine-tuning our Web site, launching a new user-friendly version of our “Find a Pro” feature, adding more member benefits, creating an ASPP Wikipedia page, updating and expanding our chapter handbook, kicking off a new membership and marketing campaign, and creating a membership initiative for graduating students. We’re also in the planning stages for a hoped-for one-day educational event later in the year. In the meantime, if you’re in Chicago, the Midwest chapter is hosting its annual education and networking day on April 27th. It’s always a terrific event, and this year’s will feature speakers, including Chris Reed from the U.S. Copyright Office and Chris Bain of Sterling Publishing. So we look back on the past year with some measure of satisfaction—and exhaustion—and look forward to a year ahead, packed with new initiatives and goals to make the ASPP better than ever. Thanks for joining us!
MICHAEL
michaeldmasterson@gmail.com
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EDITOR’S LETTER
APRIL WOLFE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF THE PICTURE PROFESSIONAL DEAR ASPP FRIENDS, While many of you don’t know me, yet, I’ve been learning a great deal about you all and your wonderful organization. My predecessor, the great Niki Barrie, is a tough act to follow, but with my first issue of The Picture Professional, I’m setting some high bars for us to both retain all the original values of ASPP and simultaneously reach out to our up-and-coming prospective members, thereby ensuring a successful ASPP future to come. The first offering we have for readers is an expanded Portfolio section, featuring photographers from the three phases of a professional’s career, including work from stellar Art Center students and recent grads, elemental beach scenes from globetrotter Lane Collins, and the iconic architectural and interior images of the great Leland Lee. Leland’s story is both inspiring and informative for every picture professional, as he relays the pitfalls and triumphs of almost seventy years of work. In addition to the new portfolios, veteran Pat Hunt reports to us from the PACA conference, Frank Van Riper brings us a study of Lisa Tyson Ennis and the tradition of Ansel Adams, while newcomer Josh Steichmann discusses the Calisphere archival system. And lucky for us, Joel L. Hecker returns with some much-needed insight on copyright issues and what you can do to protect yourselves and future generations of photographers by setting a precedent. Rounding these out are our dispatches from local chapters, with photos from their awesome holiday events, and a Life in Focus from Tom Andrews. We’re very excited about our direction and the prospect of reaching a broader audience with the new membership rates and benefits, but none of it would be possible without the concerted efforts of our new photo editor, Kim Phipps, publisher, Jain Lemos, president, Michael Masterson, and our designer, Ophelia Chong, all of whom have a proven dedication to the ASPP. I’m lucky to be in such good company, and I thank you all for the chance to helm this publication into a new and exciting direction. I encourage all members—past, present, and future—to feel free to contact me about contributing opportunities. We’re looking for fresh voices for articles and striking photos for our Life in Focus section, and if you’ve read our past issues, you know you’ll be in good company, too.
A. WOLFE American Society of Picture Professionals
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WHAT’S HANGING
WHAT’S HANGING
Photo exhibitions near you.
ARIZONA
CALIFORNIA
Center for Creative Photography
Kopeikin Gallery
Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, 1961-1976
J. Bennett Fitts: 8 Dead Palm Trees
2766 La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles
1030 North Olive Road Tucson
February 25 – April 14, 2012
March 24 - June 17, 2012
Los Angeles-based artist John Fitts’ new series, “8 Dead Palm Trees,” continues his fascination with lesser-known aspects of the Southern California landscape. These palm trees were found on the outskirts of more populated Southern California communities; remnants of failed real estate developments. As such, they are the last evidentiary traces of these failures.
This landmark exhibition, curated by Claudia Bohn-Spector and Sam Mellon, brings the work of Berman and Heinecken— two seminal yet under-studied Los Angeles artists—into close conversation for the very first time. Each was interested in appropriating and repurposing images from mass media, which helped usher in the use of photography as a key element of contemporary avant-garde art. Their works are explored within the unique cultural context of 1960s and 1970s Southern California, as it fueled and amplified their highly original creative approaches.
© Robert Heinecken, Are You Rea (Title Page), 1964 –1968 Offset lithograph, 8.7 × 6.3 inches Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
As the population of Southern California has grown, developers, hopeful to capitalize on the seemingly endless population growth, have consistently looked farther east into the inhospitable regions of the Colorado and Mojave Deserts for their next real estate projects. Eventually, though, they pushed too far. Today, trees are all that remain of their aspirations. They were planted by developers with the intention of lining residential streets, but the homes were never built. They mark the entranceway to gated communities that never came to be and line the fairways of a desert golf course that is now nothing more than contoured hills of dirt. The geographic locales in which these trees were found could all be considered “the next” areas to be developed.
© J Bennett Fitts “If the Palm Tree is a sign of a desert oasis then what does a Dead Palm tree signify?”
The G2 Gallery
1503 Abbot Kinney Blvd. Venice
Nature LA: Cheryl Medow April 3 – May 13, 2012
© Wallace Berman: Untitled (Faceless Faces), 1963 Verifax collage, 31.125 × 31.125 × 1.5 inches The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Lannan Foundation American Society of Picture Professionals
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Santa Monica-based artist Cheryl Medow creates images that cause viewers to wonder whether they are actual photographs or paintings. Cheryl’s montage work is heavily influenced by the dioramas of the Museum of Natural History. She studied ceramics at the famed Chouinard Institute and received a BA in Art from UCLA, concentrating on life drawing with charcoal and pastels. Continuing her art education, Cheryl learned to make mono prints while in Santa Fe, New Mexico. These qualities become apparent in her current photomontage work.
© Cheryl Medow Botswana Roller Awarded “Photographer’s Forum, Best of Photography 2011” 9
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WHAT’S HANGING
SFMOMA
151 Third Street San Francisco
Photography in Mexico: Selected Works from the Collections of SFMOMA and Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser March 10 - July 08, 2012
CALIFORNIA ©Jennifer MaHarry Pensive
The G2 Gallery
1503 Abbot Kinney Blvd. Venice
Nature LA: Jennifer MaHarry May 15 – June 24, 2012
Jennifer MaHarry’s artistic vision of the natural world is succinctly expressed in a series of images exhibited in Nature LA. In 2000, Jennifer founded Eden Creative, where, as Creative Director, she oversees motion picture print advertising campaigns. Jennifer is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts at Syracuse University. She has exhibited at the Kingston Museum of Contemporary Arts and the Venice Art Walk.
Presenting a complex synthesis of art and politics, this exhibition explores Mexico’s distinctively rich and diverse photography tradition from the 1920s to the present. It begins in the period following the Mexican Revolution, when international artists, such as Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, found creative inspiration in Mexico and, in turn, helped to inspire Mexican photographers, like Lola Álvarez Bravo and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Including photographs made for the illustrated press at mid-century and documentary investigations from the 1970s and 1980s, the exhibition concludes with contemporary examinations of social, environmental, and economic concerns, both within Mexico and along its northern border. The selection of more than 150 photographs showcases works by Manuel Carrillo, Graciela Iturbide, Elsa Medina, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Mariana Yampolsky, and many more, drawing from SFMOMA’s photography collection and a recent major gift from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser.
MASSACHUSETTS Robert Klein Gallery
38 Newbury Street, Fourth Floor Boston
Wild on Earth Featuring: Piper Mackay
© Lourdes Grobet Ponzoña, Arena Coliseo, ca. 1983; gelatin silver print San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Jane and Larry Reed
Jim Dow: American Studies
May 15 – June 24, 2012
March 17 - May 5, 2012
Piper Mackay’s work as a photographer is focused primarily on the continent of Africa, its magnificent wildlife, and its diverse social milieu. Piper left the fashion world to focus on her photography full time, and since her initial trip to Africa, she has been back eight times and to eight different countries, mostly in the eastern part of the continent. Her images have been displayed at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, The Museum of History and Industry, and The Art Wolfe Gallery.
Jim Dow’s photographs focus on the passage of time as it is recorded in landscapes from North Dakota to Great Britain to Argentina. Using an 8 x 10 inch view camera, Dow turns his lens to roadside signs, aging buildings, and interiors that feel locked in another era. His images honestly record the scenes before his camera, avoiding sentiments of nostalgia, while paying tribute to marks made to the land by past and current residents. A leading American photographer, Dow pushes his viewer to reconsider familiar surroundings and discern the beauty and cultural history hidden in a North Dakota car wash, a British convenience store, and an Argentinean barbershop.
©Piper Mackay Mother Cheetah with Cubs Featured in the Smithsonian Institute’s “Nature’s Best” exhibit, 2008 American Society of Picture Professionals
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© Jim Dow American Studies
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NEW YORK
Sheldon Concert Hall and Art Galleries
Steven Kasher Gallery
Edge of Darkness: Photographs by Steve Giovinco and Tim Simmons
Occupying Wall Street: A Visual Diary
3648 Washington Boulevard Saint Louis
521 West 23rd Street New York
by Accra Shepp November 11, 2011 – Ongoing
February 17 - May 12, 2012
Occupying Wall Street is an ongoing visual record of the protest in Zuccotti Park. Each week artist Accra Shepp makes twenty to thirty portraits of individuals who are participating in the demonstration. Using a 4x5 view camera with black and white film, Shepp’s vision slows down the action of the protest and allows the viewer to exercise a sustained gaze. The project’s home in the vitrine space of the Steven Kasher Gallery provides a street-level view for all who pass by. As the Occupy Wall Street protest continues, Shepp will add new images on a weekly basis to the installation. Visitors are invited to contribute their comments on the protest and the images in a ledger at the gallery.
Tim Simmons’ hauntingly beautiful, ethereal landscapes examine the multilayered relationship we have with our physical environment. Taken in natural settings and lit artificially, the landscapes he renders take on a surreal, otherworldly quality. Born in 1955 in London, England, Simmons has exhibited his work internationally. Installations and projections of his work have been shown in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Grand Rapids and Kaunas, Lithuania.
This exhibition pairs the work of two photographers who have each independently investigated the quality of light and its psychological implications in the moment that is the edge of darkness. New York artist Steve Giovinco renders the mysterious qualities of ambient light in the landscape, producing works that are both cinematic and literary. Giovinco’s photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally. His works are in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; and Yale University Museum of Art.
A Steven Kasher Gallery exhibition, “One photographer’s view of Marilyn Monroe” was featured on CBS Sunday Morning, April 29, 2012. ©Accra Shepp Untitled (Family), October 1, 2011 Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York
Click here to read more
WASHINGTON, DC National Geographic Museum © Steve Giovinco Untitled (Tevere, Rome, #140), 2007, 20x24 inches
© Tim Simmons Rockpool #4, Devon, UK, 2005/2008, digital “type C” print, 35.4 x 52 inches
Big Cats: Vanishing Icons
NEW YORK
September 24, 2011 – April 8, 2012
Pace/MacGill Gallery
Robert Mann Gallery
August Sander/Boris Mikhailov: German Portraits
Jörn Vanhöfen: Aftermath
March 22 – May 5, 2012
March 15 – May 5, 2012
This exhibition juxtaposes twenty twentieth-century portraits by German cultural documentarian August Sander (1876-1964) with ten photographs from Ukrainian-born Boris Mikhailov’s (b. 1938) German Portraits series (2008) to examine how two seminal photographers approached the subject of portraiture in Germany, nearly a century apart.
In his debut exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery, Jörn Vanhöfen presents large-format color photographs from his recent body of work, Aftermath. Although his subject is perhaps best characterized as human interventions in the landscape and the structures of civilization, Vanhöfen’s images evince a psychological range extending beyond more familiar conceptions of post-New Topographics landscape photography. Not mere documents, these grand tableaus function as visual metaphors: allegories of architecture and the complex dynamic between nature and culture. Searching pictures, they suggest that amidst the decay and abandonment that all is not disconsolate and beyond redemption. Indeed, wit and awe appear in equal measure with outrage and condemnation.
210 Eleventh Avenue, Floor 10 New York
545 West 22nd Street New York
American Society of Picture Professionals
1145 17th Street NW Washington, D.C.
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Stunning photographs feature eight endangered big cat species: lions, tigers, cheetahs, leopards, jaguars, snow leopards, clouded leopards, and mountain lions. These big cats are in crisis—all victims of conflicts with humans and habitat loss or degradation. Loss of big cats means not only the loss of majestic creatures, but also destruction of the natural balance of entire environments. To address this critical situation, the National Geographic Society, together with Explorers-in-Residence Dereck and Beverly Joubert, launched the Big Cats Initiative. Conservationists are working together on this comprehensive endeavor centered on a grant program supporting on-the-ground education, development, and scientific projects. Current efforts include construction of predatorproof livestock enclosures, determination of population size and ranges for improved species management, and anti-snaring and antipoaching programs to reduce human-big cat conflicts and mortality. ©Accra Shepp Untitled (Woman in Velvet Dress), October 15, 2011 Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York 13
aspp.com
WHAT’S HANGING
MISSOURI
WHAT’S HANGING
WASHINGTON STATE
discovering that they were both men in their forties who love to play dress up.
Photo Center NW
Chad States taps into the mysticism and secrecy that still exists and surrounds queer culture. He documents hidden points of encounter in public spaces where homosexual men meet to engage in sexual interactions.
900 12th Avenue Seattle
Author and Subject: Contemporary Queer Photography
Peruvian artist, Rafael Soldi, approaches homosexuality from a cultural perspective. These images represent his struggle to surface from darkness, panic, and hopelessness.
April 6 – May 27, 2012
rtists: Adrain Chesser, Kelli Connell, Katie Koti, Molly Landreth, Steven Miller, Chad States, Lorenzo Triburgo, Amelia Tovey, and Sophia Wallace
INTERNATIONAL
This exhibition focuses on ten contemporary photographers who explore queer culture through identity, gender, courage, humor, relationships, sexuality, and the human form. Here are some select biographies of the artists:
Stephen Bulger Gallery 1026 Queen Street West Toronto Ontario
Sanaz Mazinani: Frames of the Visible
Kelli Connell’s images appear to document a relationship between two women. Their idiom looks familiar: a young couple caught up in everyday moments of pleasure and reflection.
May 5 – June 9, 2012
In Frames of the Visible, Sanaz Mazinani examines the disassociation that occurs between an event and its photographic record. Using destabilizing images of war mined from online news media outlets, Mazinani constructs photographic collages that collapse the intimations of the original image, thus creating a new representation of conflict. Mazinani explores the relationship between perception and representation by drawing from concepts such as censorship, scale, and the body as a site of action or violence.
Katie Koti’s series, Asunder, reflect her exploration of gender and its relationship to sexuality. She uses the seductive aesthetic appeal of landscape to engage the viewer, but the landscape is simultaneously represented as ambiguous. Steven Miller and Adrain Chesser are both photographers in their own right who began collaborating in 2010 after
© Sanaz Mazinani Together We Are (detail), 2011 American Society of Picture Professionals
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CHANGES IN THE WIND
© Picture Alliance
PACA AND THE FACE-TO-FACE PHOTO MINDS MEETING
BY PAT HUNT American Society of Picture Professionals
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WHENEVER TECHNOLOGY. the economy, or the entire social norm endures change, the picture industry flows right along with it. We remain current, vital, and fully aware of customer needs and demands. New ways of addressing these changes became clear at the last PACA International Conference in New York City (Picture Agency Council of America/pacaoffice. org), where seven top global attendees expressed their place in the industry today, and their visions for a successful future. Masterfile (masterfile.com) hangs their star on a designerfriendly website optimized for fast and creative image searching. Geoff Cannon, Executive Vice President based in Toronto, and Tomas Speight, Senior Vice President of International based in Dusseldorf, get excited about demonstrating their full range of rights managed and royalty-free, high-quality content on the latest version of their website, rolled out in July. Their philosophy is, “Great work made easy,” and their goal is to allow the client to save time and find a better picture. “Customizability and innovative search and display are the key assets of the site,” says Tomas. There are five different sizes of thumbnails available for viewing ease, and pictures can be dragged and dropped into the shopping cart or a lightbox, with new similar images available in that lightbox when it’s reopened, giving constant access to the most current material. The site also allows for multiple search tabs to be viewed next to each other. There is a ColorSearch, offering instant results for any color scheme that might need a match, Upload&Find, which allows any picture to be uploaded © Masterfile and matched or aligned with a similar, and VisualPairing, which allows a search for two things at once. For example, images of a mother and child can be matched to look like they belong to the same family. There is also an automatic SimSearch, allowing a combination of diverse concepts to be matched for a design need. Associated Press (ap.org and apimages.com) is the new guy on the block. Jonathan Mars is the Partner Development Manager for AP Images. AP is changing with the industry by making a push into stock photos. Jonathan says, “People think of AP for news, politics, entertainment and sports. We are very good at covering those topics, especially breaking news.” Now they hope to offer clients more value, and since they have done deals with the National Football League and the NCAA, they have a new type of client coming to the site. AP now works with such collections at Image Source, Blend Images, PhotoAlto, Ojo, Glow Images, and some rights-
managed collections. For decades, AP thought itself a memberowned newsgathering cooperative serving the member needs only—its core mission. Now, with a great marketing team in place for the commercial photo division, they are a full-service agency. As for the future, Jonathan says, “We are an editorial company doing some different things. When big events happen around the world, AP is always the first one there.” He further adds that AP prides itself on its reach. They cover every game in sports, and have unprecedented access all over the world. Alamy (alamy.com) is another company that seems nimble enough to keep changing with the times. James Allsworth, Video Content Executive, explains that Alamy is the world’s largest online searchable collection of images, continually adding about fifteen thousand images a day. The original New York office started with five people, and now it’s up to fifteen. In May 2011, they launched in Germany with their first Germanlanguage version of their site and a Germanspeaking customer service and sales team, and they’re expanding their direct sales operations to Australia and the Middle East. They just launched a livenews service with a team ready to send images to news desks all over the world, and perhaps most innovative, Alamy is embracing moving pictures by expanding in video footage this year, launching with a simplified licensing model. In their thirteen years of operation, the selection process for images has remained the same, using technical criteria for editing, as opposed to content. Their vast collection includes content from emerging photographers, seasoned professionals and world-renowned picture agencies. According to James, “Who are we to decide what will sell and what will not sell?” He says that through all the growth, their main ethos has not changed: they are very photographer friendly, easy and fast for customers, and they give fair deals to all contributors. Also, Alamy is very unique in that 89% of its profits go to charity, and it supports a medical research lab right in its own offices. Avenue Images (avenue-images.com), of Germany, is the “one-stop shop for royalty-free images.” Joachim Koutzky, the founder, says this aggregator of top-quality content offers all the major collections of RF imagery, along with some specialty collections, distributing mainly to German, Austrian and Swiss clients. His pricing reflects the current range of offering in RF globally, starting with 20€ for easyFotostock and going up to 17
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American Society of Picture Professionals
© AP © Almay © Avenue
the main brands priced between 80€ and 600€. Joachim is branching out into some edited and specialized brands of rights managed to test new markets, but they have been able to resist the microstock market and still grow, as they give personal and quick service with a focus on one-stop shopping. Joachim says, “We have account executives that will spend as much time with the customer as he/she needs.” Time is an important element in serving the customers, because ninety percent of their customers are agencies, so they don’t get involved in the editorial side of the business. Therefore, they are not affected by any decrease in price for the news and editorial market. Also they are adding fifty thousand video clips, which, he says, is very new to the German market. ageFotostock (agefotostock.com) is a frequent participant in PACA events. Alfonso Gutierrez has been the CEO for 38 years, and they have offices in Barcelona, Madrid, New York and Paris. Alfonso started as a photographer, with publishers asking him to find them images in the UK market. He says that’s how AGE got started, as he had to shoot and research for clients. That endeavor grew into a full agency. He started in the early ‘70s, and branched out late in that decade with an alliance with FPG. In 1992, they started digitizing images, and by 1996 he had developed their first website. In 2000 they took the next steps into the digital age and started scanning every transparency, and after that, they invited small image suppliers to host their high-resolution imagery on their own system in order to work with clients, and to save them the overhead of the new technology downloads. AGE reads like a history lesson in the stock industry. And PACA is important to AGE because they have the New York office among other reasons. Providers want to talk to them, and Alfonso is always a great panelist in some of the excellent PACA seminars. Alfonso’s most important comment of the day, “I think that a tragedy of our industry is not incorporating photographers in a very active manner. We have to create a triangle to include the photographers.” Microstock does a better job of this, and AGE is striving to achieve that goal of good contributor stats and instant available information. Picture Alliance GmbH (picture-alliance. com) was represented by Edith Stier-Thompson and Peter Stroh. Edith says they are the numberone in Germany for picture sales. They have eighteen million images, as well as video clips, infographics, and illustrations. Their inventory covers creative, editorial, and historical images. Their market is global, but their core focus is Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Picture Alliance maintains their pricing by offering quality
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work and more exclusivity with their partners. They’re also growing their historical content, which is very valuable to the publishing market. They have a growing request for footage and now offer twenty thousand clips on such material as creative, food, historical, entertainment, and aerials. Assignment photography is also a growing field for Picture Alliance. They can manage the quality and design resources on all levels, offering a deeper connection to their clients. And partnering with German sports associations gives them the opportunity to work with sponsors when they need photography. Corbis Images (corbisimages.com) is the master at keeping up with the times. Jason Brown, Director of Media Partners, says Corbis licenses media across the board, from motion to still images covering news, sports, entertainment, editorial, historical and commercial product. They have offices in New York, London, Paris, Germany, Italy, China, and Australia, and this year Corbis is transforming the media part of the organization, which includes news, sports, and entertainment. Next year they will focus on the commercial side of the business. The transformation of Veer, to focus on the price-conscious volume customer, has been very successful. According to Jason, “The intent of the transformation was to give more people the tools to create. It is about inspiring the Creative in everyone and offering the tools do great work regardless of budget.” Corbis is represented at PACA because of the networking opportunities with both the North American and the European partners. But, according to Jason, “The educational conferences at PACA are the best in the industry. If you miss the sessions, they are now available online.” Corbis also works closely with PACA on the legal side. They are very active in chasing infringements of their contributor content, actively ensuring their place in the photo world, because what’s good for the individual photographer is also good for their clients, and clients’ needs are their main focus today as they will be years into the future. AB 19
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THE WORK OF LANE COLLINS American Society of Picture Professionals
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© Lane Collins
© Lane Collins
NOBLE ELEMENTS
Butterfly
Volition
THE IMAGES IN THIS SERIES, CALLED “ALCHEMY”, were created on the beaches of Nelson, New Zealand. When I first
arrived in New Zealand, I could physically sense how far away it was from the rest of the world. It was the first time in years I had felt immersed in nature on a daily basis, and reorienting myself was difficult. Now I could see the Milky Way from my backyard, but the constellations were different and The Man in the Moon was upside down, as was the rest of my world.
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Mind’s Eye
In this project, I was interested in the concept of the four elements—earth, air, fire and water—and the way they’ve been assimilated and interpreted by different cultures and worldviews. For example, earth is fertile and feminine, while air is the source of the breath and so represents communication and intellect. Influenced by the tarot cards I’d toyed with in my youth, I gravitated towards using animals and symbols to represent the archetypes I was exploring. I started to see the shoreline of the ocean as a sort of threshold between water, earth, and air; it seemed like the perfect place to experiment.
American Society of Picture Professionals
© Lane Collins
© Lane Collins
The Alchemist
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Gathering the right props took quite a bit of time. Living in a small town meant I didn’t have many of the resources I was accustomed to in San Francisco, so locating uncommon items, like a set of brass scales or Pyrex beaker, took a great deal of work. I scoured shops, second-hand stores, and online listings. Luckily, New Zealand is a very friendly place, so I was able to borrow the more difficult-to-find items from local stores and antique shops, such as a taxidermy rabbit.
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Scales
For each shoot, I was focused on working with only one or two concepts, as I would often spend hours searching for the right location, the right light, or the right tide before I began setting up. I usually had a general idea about what I wanted the image to look like, but I would often work with found objects from the location to bring the pictures to life.
American Society of Picture Professionals
© Lane Collins
© Lane Collins
100 Monkeys
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All the images in the “Alchemy” series were shot on Fuji Pro 400H film with my Hasselblad 503CW. Most of the time it was just me, with my camera, a reflector, and a bag full of props, making strange little installations in the sand. Overall, I spent about a year working on the project. AB
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AND NOW... A BLAST FROM ASPP’S PAST! We picture pros love to search dusty cases and mysterious boxes for hidden gems. Deep in the ASPP archive we found these rules for the Luncheon Committee, circa 1972. It appears as though the passage of time does not change the all important rule: Never let leftover wine go to waste!
BAL_March_2012.pdf
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S E Rvenice E N inI Swinter SIMA
SERENISSIMA venice in winter
PHOTOGRAPHS by FRANK VAN RIPER and JUDITH GOODMAN TEXT by FRANK VAN RIPER “One of life’s subtlest acquired pleasures is the Venice of winter, of mists and puddles, umbrellas and empty alleys and gondolas in the rain. This book magically acquires the pleasure for us—and no less miraculously — enables us to enjoy it all the year round.” — JAN MORRIS, AUTHOR, THE WORLD OF VENICE; FELLOW OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE
P H OTO GRAPHS BY FRANK VAN R I P E R A N D J U D I T H G O O D M A N
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T E X T B Y FRANK VAN RIPER
AVAILABLE on AMAZON.COM and BARNESANDNOBLE.COM To order signed and inscribed copies, visit www.veniceinwinter.com American Society of Picture Professionals
“Serenissima: Venice in Winter takes us on the rare journey that a perfect book can and unravels the secrets of a very personal walk through the streets, canals, and homes of Venice…This book is a rare combination of pictures that take you there, and prose that lets you feel as if you’re watching it all from the corner of a small Venetian coffee bar, espresso in hand, ever glancing out the windows.” — DAVID BURNETT, PHOTOJOURNALIST, CONTACT PRESS IMAGES
Visual Connections New York Image Expo
EXCLUSIVE NETWORKING EVENT FOR IMAGE BUYERS AND RESEARCHERS
CHICAGO IMAGE EXPO
The Cultural Center’s Preston Bradley Hall 78 E. Washington Street Thursday, April 26th 2012 Free morning session: 10 – Noon Exhibit floor: Noon – 6:00pm
Register now for free entry:* www.visualconnections.com/ASPP Join us and discover new sources of still and moving imagery Enjoy free refreshments > Win valuable prizes > Network with peers
Looking for new image sources now? www.imagesources.org Try www.imagesources.org
Historic Timeless Changing
New York
Close to 100,000 historic images available on line at the Museum of the City of New York’s Collections Portal at www.mcny.org available for your next project! All images by Stanley Kubrick/Museum of the City of New York.
Join us on LinkedIn®, the meeting place for everyone who creates or uses imagery: www.visualconnections.com/linkedin www.visualconnections.com/linkedin *
This event is exclusively for professional image buyers. The organizers reserve the right to restrict admission.
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PORTFOLIO
RENE RODRIGUEZ
FASHION/ADVERTISNG/LIFESTYLE A CAPTURER OF MOTION renzstar.com
ART CENTER COLLEGE OF DESIGN PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
FOCUS ON STUDENT PHOTOGRAPHY CURATED BY OPHELIA CHONG
HEATHER LANDIS ILLUSTRATOR/PHOTOGRAPHER/BELIEVER IN BEAUTY heatherlandis.com
JEREMY JACKSON DOCUMENTARY/PORTRAITURE/EDITORIAL/A DIFFERENT VIEW American Society of Picture Professionals
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JEREMY JACKSON jeremyjacksonphoto.com 33
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JOSH SCHAEDEL
FINE ARTIST/WRITER/ A PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE LOST MOMENT joshschaedelphotography.com
JESSE STONE REVEALER OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY jessestonephotography.com
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@ Leland Y. Lee
Elrod House, Palm Springs Modernism by John Lautner. 1969
A SCALE BY WHICH WE WILL BE MEASURED THE MASTER WORK OF LELAND Y. LEE BY APRIL WOLFE
Out of the Shadow: Find out more about the life and work of Leland Lee in this exhibition review by Morris Newman for Palm Springs Life. Click Here American Society of Picture Professionals
Frank S. Wyle House near North Fork, Madera County, designed by John Rex of Honnold & Rex, 1987-88. 36
LELAND LEE DRINKS HIS CUP OF BLACK COFFEE, wipes a crumb from the table, and says, “I was just there for scale.” He is, of course, referencing his numerous appearances in Julius Shulman’s work from his eight years as his assistant, but something more can be found in this statement. Lee, now a healthy and vibrant ninety-three, has outlived and outworked the majority of his peers. Finding his niche first in a chance meeting at a portrait studio in Hawaii, he transitioned into architectural photography after assisting Shulman, and eventually went on to become one of the most published and recognized photographers you’ve never heard of. Even as recently as 2009, works of his have been used on the covers of widely-circulated magazines with absolutely no acknowledgement or credit given, and while this type of image stealing is definitely a growing epidemic with tendrils reaching into all disciplines, it’s especially detrimental to Lee, who has almost no archive left from his sprawling career. Years ago, most of his physical archive was washed away in the flooding of his Hollywood home, and what wasn’t lost in the flood was lost in a strange fire that broke out in his garage the next year. All that’s left can fit neatly into a small yellow bag, which is watched over by his trust lawyer.
If Lee were religious, he may have seen all this as a sign, but Leland continued to make work with his meticulous attention to minute details, something he considered to be first-nature. He sees himself as a surrogate to the homeowners whose interiors and homes he photographed, styling plateware and magazines on tables and acting as florist for imaginary dinner parties. Included in his long history of work are iconic images of the Wylie house, the very first images of the completed Elrod house, and the interiors of Sam Maloof, among countless others, but the extensivity of Lee’s career also poses several problems in recovering his archives. Lee’s images have been circulating for decades, and, over time, have become so iconic that they seem to stand alone, while Leland as the photographer is rarely considered. In addition, many of Lee’s peers who have access to his photographs have already passed, and those who are still alive may not be as savvy to the internet, and so won’t be easily found or contacted. In a short preliminary search for interior designers who may have some of his photographs, three out of three leads went nowhere, with business and personal numbers disconnected. Also, though seemingly less tragic than the loss of his photographs, Lee lost his journals in the fire. Decades of notes 37
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@ Leland Y. Lee
Elrod House, Palm Springs Modernism by John Lautner. 1969 American Society of Picture Professionals
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The Herculaneum at the Getty Villa, designed by Daniel, Mann & Mendenhall. Landscape design by Emett Wemple. 39
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@ Leland Y. Lee @ Leland Y. Lee
Home of Micheline Lerner
Morrocan tent
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and personal accounts of his work that could have led to archive connections today have disappeared. But more disappointing is that the story of decades of growth, achievement, hard work, successes, and learning experiences will never be known to the young photographers in generations to come. Lee recounts the hours of labor put into the incandescent lighting and staging of exterior night shots of the Wylie House, crouching in the marshes in almost pitch-black dark, only to have all of the circuit breakers bust right before the photos were taken. He talks of scouting out a home location for months and the labor and networking to find such a home, only to find that the Los Angeles Times sent Ezra Stoller instead. But Lee also remembers fond surreal moments like his photo shoot at Cher’s house, with his son’s assistance, both of them noting how innocent Cher looked with Chastity asleep there in a cradle. What stories he has must be told orally or recorded here, or they will be lost.
a healthy diet coupled with the life motto, “I just pretend I’m young.” Through the many innovations in photography and photographic equipment over the years, Lee embraced all of it, welcoming his digital camera, which he now uses to take snapshots of his family and trips, and which we’ll assume are as precisely crafted as any of his work.
Still Leland persists. With a pair of fitted leather pants and black boots, he could pass for much younger. On our afternoon with Leland, he even persuaded us to accompany him to the grocery store, where he purchased some much-needed ice cream rations, but even with some sugary treats, Leland swears by
While he may be greatly remembered for his appearance for physical scale in Shulman’s photographs, Leland Lee is also an historical measure for all photographers, a representative of a body of work by which many will be judged for decades to come, and his “scale” makes much very pale and small in comparison. AB
His is the story of longevity, perseverance, and high art, which you’ll see in the few photographs included here, all of which have come from that small, yellow bag. But our hope with the publishing of these images is that someone somewhere may know of or have seen Leland Lee’s characteristic images. With the help of some kind Art Center students, we’ll be digitizing his collection and tagging each image with the necessary metadata to continue tracking down his legacy. You can help by spreading the word and contacting us at editor@aspp.com.
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TALKING PHOTOGRAPHY FRANK VAN RIPER
LANDSCAPES Lisa Tyson Ennis makes a beautiful argument for traditional techniques Visit her web site
McCurdy Smokehouse, Lubec, Maine @Lisa Tyson Ennis
Moonlit tent, Chadd’s Ford, PA @Lisa Tyson Ennis
ANSEL ADMS, ARGUABLY AMERICA’S GREATEST LANDSCAPE Lisa interprets rather than documents, offering the viewer PHOTOGRAPHER, and one of the finest black and white darkroom what might be called her emotional response to a scene, not printers of his generation, drew on his training as a musician to coin this perfect metaphor: “The negative is the score; the print is the performance.” In that simple construction, touching on the myriad ways a single image can be interpreted in the darkroom, Adams made a slam-dunk case for photography as fine art. In the tradition of Adams, Lisa Tyson Ennis, a passionate photographer since high school, is above all drawn to the landscape and how the natural world arranges itself into its elemental shapes to reflect elegant compositions and produce lasting images. She works in medium and large formats on black and white film. Her exposures can last as long as half an hour. And afterward, she makes her own prints one by one in a traditional wet darkroom. She says she’ll never change. And because of that, the beautiful artisanal work of Lisa Tyson Ennis matters now more than ever. She is not, strictly speaking, a documentarian—simply recording what happens before her lens, then translating that onto photographic paper. “Almost all of my work is done in really low light so I am never shooting in full sun ever,” Ennis declared. “[It’s] usually first thing in the morning, like 4 o’clock in the morning, or after the sun is down for a while.” And her exposures, routinely several seconds long, especially in large format, also can last as long as thirty minutes, rendering water as smooth as glass, and night skies dotted with star trails. American Society of Picture Professionals
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its passport photo. “I suppose I am creating a landscape. Since I cannot see what the film is capturing over time with the long exposures, it’s always a joy to see in the processed film just what nature was doing (as the waves crash in and recede, or clouds zoom overhead, or leaves rustle in the wind). My soul was also doing some collecting while I waited for that long exposure and all of those feelings as I listened to the waves, birds, seals, wind etc., create a beautiful memory which I try to express in the print once I get back to the darkroom.” To be sure, Ansel Adams—who was both master photographer and master printer—viewed the physical process of photographic printing as a wholly separate art form. Easy for him, one could argue, since he was great at both. And also, to be sure, some of his great contemporaries, like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, almost never worked in the darkroom, being too busy traveling the world documenting society or covering breaking news to spend any significant time getting their hands wet. It often falls to the landscape photographer to carry this double burden, the best among them seeming to carry it effortlessly. But Lisa, too, embraces the darkroom. “Yes, all the stuff is there,” Ennis notes, quickly removing herself from legions of PhotoShop shooters who live to improve their images
after the fact by digitally changing, adding, or removing elements, and thereby shattering what the great Italian photojournalist Gianni Berengo Gardin calls the essential “truth” of a photographic image. She does use all the tools of the traditional wet darkroom—cropping, dodging, burning in, bleaching, and toning—“so your eye is more directed to what I want you to look at…no, I don’t move anything around.” What you see is what you get. But what you get in a Lisa Tyson Ennis photograph also is what she wants you to see. The amazing thing about photography, especially black and white fine-art photography with its infinite variations of white-to-grey-to-black, is that there is rarely one perfect interpretation of an image. Just as different musicians can interpret the same score differently, so, too, can different photographers (or even the same photographer over time) print the same image differently, sometimes over decades. Adams himself did this years ago for a show at the National Museum of American Art late in his life. It was a kind of Ansel‘s Greatest Hits retrospective that I reviewed for the Washington Post. On a hunch, and to compare Adams’ earlier and later prints of the same iconic images, I brought to the press preview my signed coffee-table edition of his classic book Yosemite and the Range of Light, published by the New York Graphic Society in 1979. Sure enough, there were marked differences in the tonal range of such familiar images as “Clearing Winter Storm” and “Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada.” On balance, the newer prints were starker, more contrasting—punchier, if you will. Landscape photographers by definition must work slowly, painstakingly, to set up their shot, in many cases for hours— and don’t forget waiting for the right light—to make only one or two exposures. Having expended such effort to record an image on film, does it not stand to reason that this artist also might want to ensure that the resultant image is the best it can be through the hands-on development of their work? In talking to Lisa Tyson Ennis, the novice might remark on how
much she does before she even presses the cable release on her Hasselblad or her view camera, much less how much time she spends later laboring in the darkroom over each gelatin silver print. But both sides of the process require a great deal of time and dedication to the craft, as well as knowledge from years of experience. This past summer, during an exhibition of her work in Lubec, ME, where my wife Judy and I teach photography workshops (www.summerkeys.com), Lisa graciously lugged a big rolling equipment bag to the gallery to show our workshop students some of what she brings to a shoot and unlimbered a wonderfully hefty and retro Hasselblad 503C medium format film camera. Lisa also rolled out her tripod—a big thing large enough to hold steady a 4x5 view camera (she recently acquired an 8x10). Looking at the tripod, one is reminded of the old truism: there are small tripods and there are sturdy tripods, but there are no small sturdy tripods. Of her work, she pointed out to us a particular photo of the weir at Grand Manan. A weir is a huge net suspended in the water by a series of rough-hewn wooden poles. “They’re all shaped differently,” she said, “it’s really magical.” And certainly, this image looks magical—almost as if the weir were floating in the clouds. In fact, the cloud-like effect is the result of a combination of a long exposure rendering the water glassysmooth and reflecting the overhead clouds in that surface. But how does one meter for such a photo? “You just have to guess,” Lisa said. Sophisticated spot meters can offer some parameters for gauging f-stop and shutter speed, but when you work in the wild blue yonder of minuteslong exposures, experience becomes the best teacher. Couldn’t you bracket exposures, one of our students asked. “It depends on how much light there is,” Lisa replied. “For example, if it’s gonna be, like, a 30-minute exposure, you’re not going to do much bracketing.” Such ability to gauge correct exposure through experience also explains Ennis’ move to Fuji Acros BxW film from her 43
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Helping creative people illustrate their ideas for over sixty-five years
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@Lisa Tyson Ennis
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Star Trails and Animal Sounds
previous favorite, Kodak T-Max 100. Very long exposures can produce an effect called reciprocity failure. In color film, this can mean bizarre color shifts, even if the “exposure value” for the long exposure is identical to that of a shorter one. In Lisa’s case, working in black and white, she said she found the T-Max film routinely underexposed during long exposures while the Fuji film did not. So she switched. As digital technology inevitably improves, both in image capture and image printing, it is reasonable to ask whether people like Lisa Tyson Ennis are dinosaurs. My wife Judy and I, in our commercial photography careers, probably can’t remember the last time we shot film: literally all of our commercial work today is digital, be it for annual reports, corporate or association websites or even for the occasional wedding or bar mitzvah that we still do, mostly for former American Society of Picture Professionals
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clients. And, of course, our workshops, in both Maine and Italy (www.experienceumbria.com) are all digital, the better to review students’ work in real time. So with so much emphasis on the “negative,” or the “score,” in digital photography, where does this leave Adams’ equation? “I believe in the handmade print,” Lisa Tyson Ennis declares. “Each print is its own piece. I also love the soft cave-like quality of the darkroom, where I can shut myself in for hours at a time and really focus on the prints.” Focus on the performance. In the world of fine art photography there always will be a place—and a market—for the individually made stunning black and white wet darkroom print, handmade by the artist in a darkroom whose components have barely changed over nearly two centuries. AB
IMAGE RESEARCH & BOOK DESIGN Terri Wright provides creative visual solutions, rights negotiations, permissions, archive management, scanning & photo restoration. 805-682-6639 | www.terriwright.com
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JOEL L. HECKER, ESQ.
MASS DIGITIZATION, COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT SMALL CLAIMS AND YOU
HOW WILL THE COPYRIGHT OFFICE PROTECT YOUR RIGHTS?
The CO recognizes that these developments have sparked public debate on the risks and opportunities that mass book digitization may create. Questions raised by the Analysis include: What mass digitization projects are currently underway in the United States? What are the objectives, and who are the intended beneficiaries? How are the exclusive rights of copyright owners implicated? What exceptions or limitations may apply, to whom, and in what circumstances? To the extent that there are public policy goals at issue, what could Congress do to facilitate or control the boundaries of mass digitization projects? Are efficient and cost-effective licensing options available? Could Congress encourage or even require new licensing schemes for mass digitization? Could it provide direction and oversight to authors, publishers, libraries, and technology companies as they explore solutions?
The Copyright Office has formally recognized that the marketplace for digital versions of copyrighted books (and by extension, copyrighted photographs) is expanding rapidly. Libraries and private parties clearly intend to mass digitize collections for various purposes, as evidenced by the Google Book Project. But the CO believes that issues concerning copyright law and new technologies, which were hotly debated in the Google Book cases, would benefit from further discussion among all stakeholders. To that end, the CO has now published an analysis of mass digitization issues and has, most importantly, commenced a study about the feasibility and desirability of providing a small-claims litigation alternative in copyright infringement cases, both of which it hopes will facilitate the nation’s continuing discussion on mass digitization policy. So what next?
A key preliminary consideration is the extent to which digitization projects are already underway, either on a mass scale or a more limited basis. In addition, whether the copyright owners are in a position to offer market solutions for mass digitization projects is considered an important part of the equation. Yet another concern is how to apply the existing copyright framework to the capture, collection, and preservation of “born digital” works, such as electronic books (“ebooks”) and digital photographs, and other visual artworks that might be incorporated in those books.
THE QUESTIONS WE SHOULD ALL BE ASKING As many of you know, the Google Book Project litigations arose from Google’s mass digitations of books contained in several U.S. libraries—all of this without author or publisher consent. The court ruled that the proposed class-action settlement for monetary loss on the part of copyright holders, however, would inappropriately implement a forward-looking business arrangement that would grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books without permission from copyright owners, while at the same time releasing claims well beyond those alleged in the complaint. The court also found that the proposed settlement encroached on Congress’s responsibility for setting copyright policy, which traditionally has been the exclusive domain of the legislative branch.
PICTURE PROFESSIONALS JOINING THE DISCUSSION
In response to this, the CO recently issued a forty-page analysis, entitled Legal Issues in Mass Digitization: A Preliminary Analysis and Discussion Document (the “Analysis”). The stated purpose of the Analysis is to facilitate further discussion between the affected parties and the public about possible approaches to address issues raised by the intersection between copyright law and the mass digitization of books.
All these questions apply equally to “orphan works” and to works still under copyright where the copyright owner is known and locatable. In the context of copyright law, the term “orphan work” generally means a work for which the copyright owner cannot be identified or located by a good faith user for the purpose of requesting permission. The Analysis acknowledges that the orphan-works problem is much more extreme in the area of photography than books, because the title page of books routinely identifies the author, publisher, and date of publication, while photographs often lack any copyright or ownership indicia.
Although photographers were not specifically involved in that lawsuit, the opinion directly affected them, since a companion lawsuit brought by the American Society of Media Photographers and others against Google alleged substantially the same wrongdoings and sought substantially the same relief. It was the intent of the photographer plaintiffs to become a part of any resolution of the initial lawsuit so that any determination as to authors and publishers would thereby also encompass photographers. The photographers’ case is ongoing now that the proposed settlement agreement in the authors’ case has been rejected.
The Analysis refers to the CO’s 2006 Orphan Works Report, which was prepared for Congress. Legislation was introduced on the topic, and, in 2008, Congress came very close to adopting a consensus bill. The Analysis notes that the proposed legislation is a good starting point for the orphan-works discussion. Going forward, the Analysis suggests that Congress may want to explore orphan works in the context of large-scale digitization projects, addressing concerns like whether there should be more lenient or more stringent search requirements for these types of uses.
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© Erin Cunningham
THE LAW:
“Did you even try to find my mother?” In 2008, PACA launched the orphan finder service, which allows those wishing to use an orphan image to submit a simple query to orphansearch@pacaoffice.org. PACA then forwards your image to their sprawling list of members and affiliates. The first conducted search took less than sixty minutes to find the copyright owner.
The Analysis also discusses benefits and detriments to various options for licensing, including direct licensing between digitizers and authors or publishers on an individual basis, mandatory or voluntary collective licensing between organizations authorized to grant rights and collect royalties, and statutory licensing. The Analysis does not take a position either way on any of these issues; it advances arguments for and against each potential licensing scheme. And because not all copyright infringement cases deal with extravagant sums of money lost, the CO is taking into account those instances where a relatively small amount of economic damage affects the copyright owner, giving credence to cases of ownership that may have initially been overlooked because of the high cost of legal recourse. In response to the recognition by Congress that not all copyright owners have the same resources to bring a copyright infringement lawsuit in Federal Court to protect their interests, the CO has been asked by Congress to study the real obstacles that face small copyright claim disputes and whether there can be alternatives to provide real justice in such situations.
THE COPYRIGHT OFFICE IS NOW UNDERTAKING A STUDY TO: 1. Assess the extent to which authors and other copyright owners are effectively prevented from seeking relief in Federal Court from infringements due to constraints in the current system; and 2. Furnish specific recommendations, as appropriate, for changes in administrative, regulatory, and statutory authority that will improve the adjudication of small copyright claims, enabling all copyright owners to more fully realize the promise of exclusive rights enshrined in our Constitution. Over the next two years, the CO expects to seek additional comments, conduct roundtables or hearings, and generally meet with those persons who have an interest. The Notice of Inquiry can be found at www.copyright.gov/docs/smallclaims. The deadline for the first round of comments was January 16, 2012, but the next round for comments will follow notification from the CO, so check back to that page often. I encourage all of you who have had experience in copyright infringement claims of great or small economic values to submit your comments and join the discussion. AB 47
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CHAPTER CAPTURE
© Tom Wear
New York • Midwest • DC/South • New England • West
Keywording strategies speakers from left to right: Tracy Guza, Corbis; Amy Andersen-Ross, Spaces Images; Mark Ippolito, evolveimages.com; Morgan Henry, Digital Kitchen; Jay Carskadden, Jay Carskadden Graphic Design.
WEST - SEATTLE
SISTERS is part of Hieropub LLC, a book production and publishing company. www.hieropub.com Tel: 610-705-0282 Email: patholl@hieropub.com
American Society of Picture Professionals
Peter Morville coined the term findability back in 2005, defining it as the degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate. Photographers are particularly interested in findability as it relates to their own photo collections—for streamlining workflow as an integral aspect of the archiving process and to potentially increase retrieval and promote sales activity in the stock photo arena. The Seattle ASPP West chapter hosted an event devoted to the topic of keywording, Photographers & Findability: ASPP Keywording Workshop, on November 9, 2011 at the Adobe Campus. The program was filled with tips for photographers, including consistent image tagging, developing keyword vocabularies, and applying metadata. A panel of experts, including Digital Kitchen producer Morgan Henry, graphic designer Jay Carskadden, co-founder of Spaces Images Amy Anderson Ross, and digital asset manager Tracy Guza, presented on the practical aspects of keywording for photographers and offered insight into what art buyers and photo editors are really looking for when searching for images on the Internet.
www.sistersir.com
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pecializing in image and art services for book projects: research, permissions, license negotiations, and project management. We also create technical artwork per specs or rough art.
Tracy Guza
The program started with Tracy Guza, a digital asset manager from Corbis Images, featuring some examples of effective keywords versus inexact or misleading keywords. Tracy explained the concept of a controlled vocabulary, essentially a pre-determined list of a photographer’s most commonly used keywords. When applied consistently using a tool like Adobe Lightroom, a controlled vocabulary can lend ease and speed to a photographer’s workflow and Ms. Guza demonstrated this process with screenshots and examples. The most important takeaway was the fact that specificity and simplicity are the keys to accurate keywording.
© Tom Wear
phone: (212)727-8170 fax: (212)727-8228 research@sovfoto.com
You Say Tomato, I Say Aardvark: Photographers and Findability Workshop
ASPP West’s workshop on effective keywording strategies for buyers and sellers was held at the Adobe Campus in Seattle.
© Tom Wear
Photos from Russia, former Soviet Republics, Eastern Europe, & China with an extensive archive of historical, cultural, geographic, and political material
Tracy Guza from Corbis Images discusses keywording
Moving further into the realities of running a successful photography business, Amy Anderson Ross of Spaces Images gave more examples and tips, including a marvelous highlevel guideline for keywording encouraging photographers to answer the questions who, what, where, when, why and how when selecting descriptive terms. Amy spoke about other keywording concerns such as ethnicity, synonyms, spelling, and British versus American English. The most salient point of Ms. Anderson Ross’ presentation was that photographers can choose to employ a keywording vendor instead of doing it themselves, making the point that photography professionals invest a lot of time and money in locations, sets, assistants, retouching, and other services and that keywording can ultimately prove just as important. 49
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CHAPTER CAPTURE
WEST - LOS ANGELES
Jay Carskadden works on quite a few travel industry publications and sources and utilizes a high volume of images each month. She discussed her search strategy, but most importantly, expressed a desire for specificity especially on details like location, food and beverage descriptions, and the people featured in images. Local photographer Adam Crowley was in the audience at the keywording event and said afterwards that his ultimate goal in keywording for a successful image search is “to find the perfect expression to link my images to a prospective buyer. The ASPP keywording event did a lot to keep my keywording strategies on target, by giving me information that I’m using right now, for my own images.”
Julie Caruso introduces speakers and talks about membership benefits at the event.
ASPP Los Angeles members and guests gathered on December 8, 2011, at the Kopeikin Gallery to celebrate the holiday season. Gallery owner Paul Kopeikin was gracious enough to welcome us into his space for an evening of photography, cocktails, hors d’oeurves and lots of networking. On view during our event was the stunning work of Madrid-based photographer Marta Soul. You can find additional information on the gallery’s website www.kopeikingallery.com. A fun highlight of the evening, aside from stimulating conversation with photo colleagues, was the awarding of several amazing door prizes—a beautiful gift basket courtesy of the Chanel boutique on Rodeo Drive and three of Nixon’s fun and sporty watches. © Kimberly Phipps Edie Tobias and Mary Peng, both from Corbis, examine a box of Chanel swag given away at the holiday party.
NEW YORK
MIDWEST - MINNEAPOLIS
Autumn Networking and Education Event Attorney Chris Sandberg discussing copyright updates.
Julie Caruso
More than 100 industry professionals turned out to celebrate the 2011 annual ASPP New York Holiday Party honoring Cathy Sachs, who received the Jane Kinne Picture Professional of the Year Award. Photographers, editors, picture buyers and industry folks were in attendance on December 7, 2011 at the WINInitiative headquarters. WIN-Initiative is an independent stock agency established as a source for edgy, global youth culture imagery located in SoHo.
MIDWEST
Organized by Minneapolis sub-chapter vice president Julie Caruso and member Christopher Sandberg, the ASPP Midwest Chapter held their biannual event in downtown Minneapolis, featuring industry guest speakers who examined the local, uniquely Midwestern photo world from the three lenses of future, present, and past.
Midwest ASPP members and their guests shared a great evening of camaraderie and holiday cheer. A wonderful spread of food and wine had something to please everyone. The hand crafted artisan chocolates made a memorable impression on this attendee. The band performed a great selection of tunes that had everyone on their feet dancing. An abundant number of gorgeous picture books were given out as door prizes so that many attendees left with a souvenir of the evening.
In the comfort of the Lockridge, Grindal Nauen conference room, Troy Braun, a Minneapolis-based photo agent and teacher (www.thephotoagent.com), gave a presentation highlighting his photographers’ best and most innovative work. Troy pointed to current trends in the commercial photography business and what he looks for as an agent—valuable insight for those looking to get representation. Troy reps eight local photographers in GCI/motion, food, fashion, and editorial.
Don’s view of Minneapolis from the Guthrie Theater. The prominent building on the left is the Mill City Museum, which overlooks the Mississippi River.
© www.robertherman.com Michael Masterson, ASPP National President, laughs after presenting the customary “Picture Professional of the Year” tiara to Cathy Sachs, who’s being congratulated by Jerry Tavin, a previous honoree.
DC - SOUTH ASPP DC/South held a New Year event at the Barrel Oak Winery in Virginia where members and guests enjoyed an afternoon of wine and refreshments to kick off 2012!
Chris Sandberg, ASPP member, nature photographer, and lawyer with Lockridge, Grindal Nauen, gave us an update on what current and pressing copyright issues are affecting our industry and a review of his wonderful copyright presentation that he has given in Minneapolis and Chicago. Thanks to Chris, for helping make a little sense out of copyright and for finding an entertaining way to present it. Last, but certainly not least, Don and Barbara Smetzer came in from Chicago to offer us some fascinating historical perspectives by sharing their wisdom gained from rich and varied photo careers. Barbara, the ASPP 2011 Picture Professional of the Year, was Editorial Director at CLICK/Chicago, Tony Stone Images, and Getty Images for many years. Counterpart Don has a diverse and successful career, including twenty-five years as a movie stills photographer and two years as chief photographer and director of photography for the US government in American Samoa. He was recently coined by ASMP Chicago as a “Living Legend of Photography.” American Society of Picture Professionals
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© Don Smetzer (4)
CHAPTER CAPTURE
HOLIDAY PARTIES
As avid consumers of stock imagery, both Morgan Henry and Jay Carskadden provided revealing glimpses into how they search for images and what they would like to see in terms of photographer keywords. Morgan walked the audience, filled with local photographers and a few image librarians, through his search process, generously citing his favorite sites and strategies.
Troy Braun presented the work of the photographers he represents through his agency, The Photo Agent.
© Kimberly Phipps Retiring Chapter President, Ellen Herbert, and new Chapter President, Jason Davis, enjoy raffling off party gifts at the Kopeikin Gallery.
© Jennifer Davis Heffner/Vita Images Lori Dunevant, (left) with Barrel Oak Winery in Delaplane, Va., talks to American Society of Picture Professionals members John Loggins, (second to left) Beth Partain, Lori Epstein and Jeff Mauritzen about the wine they are tasting during the ASPP DC/South New Year’s event on January 15, 2012. 51
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inspirational images of the natural world 53
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The Art and Business of Photography Susan Carr Allworth Press Paperback, 210 pages $24.95
Man Ray Portraits. Hollywood Paris Hollywood Edited by Clément Chéroux Schirmer/Mosel Hardcover, 320 pages $78.00
Left brain or right brain? Useful practicality or chaotic creativity? Ah, the perpetual dilemma for the visual artist, or, as veteran photographer Susan Carr describes it in the preface to her new book, “the delicate balance of art and commerce.” In this book, Carr wrestles with a similar need for equilibrium, as she bounces back and forth from a compelling call to arms for unbridled personal vision to such mundane, but highly necessary, topics as copyrights and paperwork. The result is a somewhat schizophrenic and highly readable text for the professional image-maker.
Man Ray, born Emanuel Rabinovitch in Brooklyn, New York, in 1890, was a multi-talented artist and a leader of American modernism. One of his many skills was as a photographer, the rudiments of which he learned from Alfred Stieglitz. In 1921, he moved to Paris, encouraged by his friend Marcel Duchamp. Once in Paris, Man Ray built a studio and a darkroom in order to support himself financially. He was then introduced into the teeming artist life of that city, “photographing everyone he knew: his friends, the Dadaists and Surrealists; the artists of Montparnasse and their models; the Americans of the Lost Generation who converged on Gertrude Stein; the international avante-garde in transit; and the luminaries of Paris fashion.” Many Ray was an intersection, but collecting his important works proved more difficult than it seemed.
Although Carr is the book’s author, and thus the primary source for relating experiences, she makes extensive use of the thoughts and stories of fellow pro shooters Richard Kelly, Sean Kernan, Leslie Burns, Nancy Wolff, Seth Godin, and Robert Adams. This lends “art and commerce” a very real-world feel, even when tackling such abstruse subjects as “the art of seeing” and “the search for the next transcendent moment.”
© Man Ray
With the German army advancing on Paris, Man had fled to the States, and when he returned to his Paris studio after the war, he found negatives and prints trampled on the floor, with most of the others removed by the authorities. To top it off, Man also had no running water in his darkroom, and any photographer of a certain age will tell you that not properly washing your negatives or prints is a recipe for their failure at a later date. This beautifully produced, scholarly book, is the culmination of fifteen years of work by the Centre Pompidou to gather, catalog, restore, digitize, and identify the 12,304 negatives and 70 prints now in its possession, this latter task being a particularly onerous one, as Man Ray kept skimpy records. It provides an exceptional account of the vibrant community of artists in the 1920s and 30s of Paris. Man said, “They came through my studio in the thousands between 1921 and 1940,” and while many of these colorful people will be known only to the cognoscenti, the artistic luminaries shown include Picasso, James Joyce, Cocteau, Alexander Calder, Ernest Ansermet, Fernand Leger, Igor Stravinsky, Henry Miller, Thomas Mann, and many more.
On balance, the scales in this book tip more towards the “business” content than the “art” side, and that’s not a bad thing. The bottom line that Carr stresses throughout the book is to find a distinct and marketable personal vision. Being true to one’s self and finding your “eye” certainly isn’t easy, but perhaps it is actually somewhat less daunting, since the process is often fueled by inner passion more than the business side of photography, for, as Carr reminds us, “Creating a viable way to make a living from art is a huge undertaking,” and as a professional, you are now managing a small business. Carr provides very practical advice, including recommendations on everything from trade groups to books, websites, and movies, as well as a methodology for pricing, and even a brief chapter on stimulating creativity. All good nuts-and-bolts stuff, but always tempered by the concurrent and persistent need for a well-honed and distinctive artistic vision that can be utilized in a commercial marketplace. By addressing both requirements for success in today’s topsy-turvy commercial photography industry, Susan Carr’s The Art and Business of Photography is an honest, informative, and motivating tome for twenty-first century image-makers. - PAUL H. HENNING
When I first leafed through this book I did wonder if Man’s reputation as a fine-art photographer had been well earned, and then I learned that he considered his studio portraits to be a first draft, and that the work he would later do on some of them considerably changed their nature. This additional artwork is clearly illustrated in the photo of Catherine Deneuve, shown both as both a full page photo and also as the cover of a June, 1968 Sunday Times magazine. My hasty judgment here was clearly misplaced. The portraits shown have a great variety and are very far from being hidebound or routine. Most of them may not represent the artist’s final vision, but they are fascinating as they stand, not to mention the seldom-referenced pioneering color photos that Man made in Hollywood during the war years, while he was in the United States. - BRIAN SEED American Society of Picture Professionals
BOOK REVIEWS
BOOK REVIEWS
The Changing Face of Portrait Photography From Daguerreotype to Digital
© Man Ray
Shannon Thomas Perich Smithsonian Books Hardcover, 176 pages $35.00
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Shannon Thomas Perich is an associate curator in the Photographic History Collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of History. In this book, she has chosen work from the collection of ten photographers, namely, George K. Warren, Julia Margaret Cameron, Barr & Wright Studio, Gertrude 55
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BOOK REVIEWS
Kasebier, Dorothea Lange, Nikolas Muray, Richard Avedon, Henry Horenstein, Lauren Greenfield, and Robert Weingarten. Among them, they cover more than 150 years of portrait photography. The earliest photos are the daguerreotypes created by George K. Warren between the years 1851–55. These images were unique, of course, so that prints from them could not be made. After 1855, Warren moved to the wet-plate process, whereby a hand-cut piece of glass was coated with light-sensitive silver nitrate and exposed to light in a camera while still tacky—clearly a tricky process but not a potentially dangerous one, unlike the daguerreotype, which involved the use of mercury vapor. Julia Margaret Cameron also used the wet-plate technique in the creation of her highly sentimental Victorian portraits, while an array of other complicated techniques were employed by the remainder of the photographers and explored here in clear, concise details.
© Charles Gatewood
Each artist’s photographs are accompanied by a four-page essay, which describes the photographer’s work as well as the advancing methods and technologies involved in capturing an image, concluding with the digital technology of today. In this way, The Changing Face of Portrait Photography works on three different levels: as an account of photographic technologies from the aforementioned daguerreotype to the digital images of today, as a handsome portfolio of the images produced by these technologies, and as an account of ten of the world’s most influential photographers and how they saw their subjects. This is a collectible book that has been nicely produced and has highly informative and sensitively written text. - BRIAN SEED
won’t even touch, but Goliath pulls it off in a tricky way with trademarked classy design and presentation. Now, a collection of Charles Gatewood’s black and white tattoo shots inaugurates the new Goliath Wallpaper of Fame magazine. Striking the right balance between transgressive and tawdry, Gatewood’s long been an anthropologist of weird America, from beat poets to queer porn stars to Satanists, and nine of his iconic photos of the defiantly inked are printed as 24 x 16 inch posters. On the reverse, they all add up to a 4 x 6 foot image of Sailor Sid (the same image as one of the smaller posters).
Wallpaper of Fame no 1 Charles Gatewood Goliath Books Magazine $24.95
Goliath Books, begun by Miki Bunge in 1997, is a German publisher of outsider photography books, with a focus on the strange, erotic, and taboo. Their first publication was a collection of UFO photography intended to be somewhat humorous, but they’ve gone on to put out a handful of boundary pushers, including work from fetish photographer, Christine Kessler, and hemp activist, Rob Griffin. And if you’re in the market for stock photography from the sex, drugs, and rock & roll arenas, Goliath now offers stock image solutions for your racier projects, something others American Society of Picture Professionals
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Printed nicely on bond paper, Gatewood’s photos show an easy affection for his freaks, and a long interview printed on the inside cover gives a comprehensive view of Gatewood’s fifty-year career. While finding a spot in the house to display a poster of a ten-inch pierced and tattooed penis can be difficult, Goliath’s Wallpaper of Fame at least makes it art. The second issue continues the tasteful erotica theme, with cheesecake male nudes from Walter Kundzicz, but future issues promise broader curation. The editors are currently seeking submissions at wallpaper@goliathbooks.com, so if you find that some of your work tends to fall outside of the norm, it may fall very well into the Wallpaper of Fame. - JOSH STEICHMANN
Panobook 2011
Award-Winning Panoramic Photographs Kolor Rocky Nook 242 pages $39.95 Sometimes the key to understanding is perspective. Taking a few steps back and seeing the forest for the trees can work wonders. That’s a philosophy to which I’m sure the contributors to Panobook 2011 can all relate, since they are uniformly dedicated to a distinctly wiiiiiide view of life. Panobook 2011 is the result of an international panoramic photography competition sponsored by Kolor (www.kolor. com), a French company founded in 2004 that makes both software and hardware for panoramic devotees. Over 500 shooters entered over 800 images, which a trio of judges than pared down to the book’s 156 examples of 360-degree vision. And, like any photography contest, there are heart-stopping images of outstanding intensity, as well as those that make you scratch your head and ask, “Who in their right mind would pick THAT photo?” Overall, however, the highs far outnumber the lows in this delectable visual treat. The fare included does tend toward the natural world, because that subject matter seems to lend itself to the panoramic approach, but a unifying element, of course, is the lack of the
human. Inanimate objects and natural landscapes make for far easier subjects than those pesky, always on-the-move humans or animals; however, there are a couple of images that include living, breathing subjects, and, naturally, they stand out, partially due to the rarity of their content. Sometimes, though, capturing a great image is more a matter of timing and patience than of subject matter. You don’t plan on the Hindenburg going down in flames, do you? Thus, Ronald Tichelaar’s photo of a stormy Norwegian countryside with rainbow and Orage sur Mahmurdağ’s rocky Turkish landscape with a bolt of lightning in the background impress not only for their gorgeous light and panoramic format, but because we know just how rare such opportunities are. Elsewhere, Front de taille’s startling image of the drilling of a second underground tunnel tube in France is both beautifully lit and a testament to modern man’s ability to shape his world, while in Eli Locardi’s “Lonely Street” in Venice, you can practically hear the vacant echoes bouncing off the man-made surfaces. I could go on, but how many different ways can you say wow? Panobook 2011 is a tasty showcase of state-of-the-art panoramic images, covering more than 85 different countries. Each turn of the page is potentially a surprise and delight; my only suggestion for an improvement would be that they laminate the pages in future additions in order to prevent damage from drooling. - PAUL H. HENNING 57
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DANITA DELIMONT Stock Photography
www.DanitaDelimont.com
Math—it’s everywhere. Part of the discovery of travel is to open our eyes and see these things. Centuries-old mosaics with geometric tiles; triangles found in the structure of bridges; feats of architectural wonder that only an engineer could build; the joys of kite flying no matter what the shape—these are the shapes of our world no matter what the language. Exciting images that engage students and show examples of educational disciplines across the globe is one of our strengths. As we move into the 21st century we need to show our children the joys and wonder of math and all it can be! For more information, visit DanitaDelimont.com call us at 425-562-1543 or email Danita@DanitaDelimont.com.
CALISPHERE CONNECTS CALIFORNIAN ARCHIVES
JOSH STEICHMANN
Far Left: Untitled [man and dog outside butcher store] Photographer: Unknown Courtesy, California Historical Society, FN-08032 Right: Untitled [woman with lantern] Photographer: Mervyn Silberstein Courtesy, California Historical Society, FN-32795 Below: [Soldiers cooking. Unidentified location.] Photographer: Unknown 1906 Courtesy, California Historical Society, FN-33978
IMAGINE A SINGLE PORTAL to all of the photo collections within California—no more repetitive searches through historical societies and public libraries to find the one reference nugget needed for an article or documentary. Enter Calisphere, a primary-source archive developed by the California Digital Library for the University of California Office of the President, collecting around 200,000 images and documents from over 100 public holdings, comprising over 500 individual websites throughout the state. It’s one unified portal, and if there’s a digitized image in public holdings in California, it’s likely there. For researchers, it’s a mixed bag. The depth of the collection is solid, especially of industrialization from WPA dams to environmental costs of logging; retro ironists will love the ‘70s photos of IBM’s mustachioed engineers surrounded by blinkenlights and clean rooms right out of Andromeda Strain. Those needing multiple crisp stills of, say, ‘60s Free Speech protestors or President Nixon will have multiple angles to choose from. But the lack of an advanced search function— and not supporting Boolean operators—hobbles the ability to dig in depth for something specific, although there is the option to search within your initial keyword results for several consecutive searches. Con’t next page. Voy Sisters, 1906, at 1617 Oak St., at Masonic Ave. Photographer: Unknown Courtesy, California Historical Society, FN-19094 American Society of Picture Professionals
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Likewise, the keywords and indexing are incomplete, and without the ability to sort results, it can make looking for one specific image more of a chore. That Calisphere sees their primary audience as K-12 teachers is obvious, if a bit frustrating. But for These Americans-style browsing or creating a robust swipe file, Calisphere connects solidly. Usage rights are still determined by local institutions, and there’s no one-click way to contact them yet, but plenty are from the sweet spot of print-ready and pre1923 creation, and doing a simple search for “California Historical Society” yields a number of possibilities within which one can search for further keywords to find an image for a very reasonable price from the CHS. With Calisphere, finding the right photo from a Californian archive just got a little easier. AB Golden Gate Park. [Building at Children’s Playground (Sharon Playground)] Photographer: Unknown 1906 [Cyanotype] Courtesy, California Historical Society, FN-34959
© Nina Wurtzel
© Judith Goodman
JOEL L. HECKER, ESQ. practices in every aspect of
FRANK VAN RIPER is a Washington-based photographer,
photography and visual arts law, including copyright, licensing, publishing contracts, privacy rights and other intellectual property issues, and acts as general counsel to photography and content-related businesses. In addition to The Picture Professional, Hecker lectures and writes on these issues in PhotoStockNotes, the New York Bar Association Journal and the association’s Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law Journal. He is a past trustee of the Copyright Society of the USA, and past chair of the Copyright and Literary Property Committee of the New York City Bar Association. Tel.: 212.557.9600; website: www.RussoandBurke.com; email: HeckerEsq@aol.com.
journalist, author and lecturer. He served for 20 years in the New York Daily News Washington Bureau as White House correspondent, national political correspondent and Washington bureau news editor, and was a 1979 Nieman Fellow at Harvard. His photography books include Faces of the Eastern Shore; Down East Maine/A World Apart; and Talking Photography. Frank’s latest book (done in collaboration with his wife and partner Judith Goodman) is Serenissima: Venice in Winter. Frank and Judith conduct The Umbria Photo Workshops in Italy, www.experienceumbria.com, and each summer they lead the Lubec Photo Workshops at SummerKeys in Lubec, Maine. Frank’s website is www.GVRphoto.com.
CONTRIBUTORS ISSUE 1 / 2012 THE PICTURE PROFESSIONAL
© Mark Hunt
PAT HUNT
Pat Hunt is a writer and workshop leader for the stock photo industry, and managing director of Huntstock.com in Boston, in partnership with Mark Hunt, creative director. Huntstock is a lifestyle image and footage production company, specializing in People with Disabilities, Elder Lifestyle, Industry/Technology and Boston Icons. Mark has been featured in magazines for his iconic travel photography, and for the community being built around Positive Lifestyle with Disabilities. pat@huntstock.com.
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American Society of Picture Professionals
© Barry Mulling
The first time JOSH STEICHMANN got paid for photography was when he turned a snack shack at a summer camp into a 12-foot by 12-foot pinhole camera. Since then, he’s had a love of alternative processes, creative risk taking, and mural prints. Working as a writer, he’s covered everything from Elvis festivals to US Code 2257, and plenty in between. As a photographer, he’s shown across Michigan, and can usually be found jumping Los Angeles fences with a home-hacked Holga. His article on Calisphere is his first for The Picture Professional.
© Rachel Seed
© Paul H. Henning
BRIAN SEED
PAUL H. HENNING
Book Reviewer Writer/photographer
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Book Reviewer. Photography consultant and CEO of Stock Answers LLC aspp.com
© Tom Andrews
LIFE IN FOCUS
HEAVY IS THE HEAD THAT WEARS THE CROWN, or so the expression goes. Actually, I was surprised to find this isn’t the exact quote. It’s from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2 and reads, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” Although the above is a fun image, it reminded me of that undeniable truth, and the “crown” dilemma is never more evident than in an election year, which is most certainly upon us in full force. It’s only spring now, which means the clamoring for the crown will certainly intensify exponentially through November and will likely get more vicious than a dogfight. We can only hope that whoever is left standing when the fur stops flying takes the responsibility as seriously as this handsome fellow seems to be. The king (above) was crowned the winner of the Bulldog Beauty Contest in Long Beach, California. Photographer Tom Andrews often incorporates canines into his photos, which ironically lends a touch of humanity and poignancy. He enjoys shooting pictures of dogs, because they’re unpredictable, which such notable photographers as Elliot Erwitt and William Wegman know full well. Andrews generally specializes in documentary street photography in and around Los Angeles. His work, which is mostly black and white, shows the starker, grittier side of L.A. life, but is nonetheless peppered with moments of dark humor and even tenderness. You can see his photos here at www.flickr.com/photos/tomandrews. Hopefully this guy is enjoying his reign as Long Beach’s most beautiful bulldog. After all, in spite of the whole heavy-is-the-head thing, there’s another line from a Mel Brooks film that sums up why we, and all of our presidential hopefuls, persist year after year: “It’s good to be the king.” – KIM
PHIPPS photo editor
Bulldog Beauty Contest facebook page
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